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• Post #4362558

  As of this weekend, I've been based in Vancouver, BC for a year. To celebrate, I wrote a newsletter about Alexis Madrigal's book THE PACIFIC CIRCUIT, having a garden, and some of the things I've been up to this past while: https://buttondown.com/metafoundry/archive/determinate-tomatoes/

• Post #3640869

  Had reason to return to the incredible story about how unbelievably skilled seamstresses, with expertise in sewing bras and girdles, developed and fabricated the spacesuits for the Apollo missions, as documented by Nicholas de Monchaux. "ILC’s attitude came through in a seamstress’s comment to a NASA technical team in 1968: “It might look all right on that piece of paper, but I’m not going to sew that piece of paper."” https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-bra-and-girdle-maker-that...

• Post #3558021

  ICYMI, I wrote a piece for Dezeen on how FIFA’s (entirely self-serving!) mandate that World Cup host cities provide game-day public transit at cost is a unique opportunity for American cities, especially for really car-centric ones — it’s a chance to experiment and to learn from other places that are addressing the same challenges at the same time. https://www.dezeen.com/2026/06/30/world-cup-transit-opinion-deb-chachra/

• Post #2558088

  @fugueish [coincidentally bought both a bacon and cheese croissant and a pastel de nata this morning, ate the croissant for breakfast, and the tart is still sitting on my counter…]

• Post #2558087

  Behind my local bike shop this morning. We did it everybody! The War on Cars is over and the cars _definitely_ lost.

• Post #2306662

  REVEIL, the livestream of field sounds that follows dawn around the world for a full day, has kicked off from a wood in Reading, UK (5am on Sat May 2 to 6am on Sun, UK time). More about the project: https://soundtent.org/reveil.html Listen here: https://soundtent.org/reveil/#/

• Post #990063

  I just heard that Tracy Kidder passed away this week. I read his THE SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE as a young teenager and it’s probably one of a handful of books I can point to as having a significant impact on my life, starting with going to engineering school. I’ve read most of his books but this one is closest to my heart. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/25/tracy-kidder-dies-aged-80

• Post #956295

  Just read another (interesting! well written!) thing that framed itself as a one-and-only, ‘nobody tells you’ revelation. My dude, you can’t prove a negative, and just because *you* haven’t seen it said before, that doesn’t mean *I* can’t point to half a dozen antecedents off the top of my head. I don’t expect everyone to have read everything. I *do* expect writers to consider that maybe they haven’t, instead of assuming that they are a lone genius on a mountaintop.

• Post #673088

  Once again, it's time for that festive tradition of listening to holiday music. A lot of it, at once -- digitized and compressed and tweaked and regenerated into what can only be described as the musical essence of the festive spirit: @bwhitman's "A Singular Christmas." Listen* here (download or stream), plus more details. Because who doesn't love a holiday album that has 'Statement and Methodology' in the liner notes? https://notes.va...

• Post #582896

  I'm nearing the end of a two-month residency at MakerLabs, a community fabrication space here in East Vancouver. I'll write and share more about it online soon, but if you're in the Lower Mainland, please come out this Wednesday, February 25th from 7-8:30pm to see what I've been up to, along with the rest of the cohort! Link + RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/tools-for-change-showcase-meetup-tickets-1974947151093

• Post #428099

  “Why I Keep Returning to Middle Earth”. This, by Tolkien scholar Michael D. C. Drout, is fascinating: textual analysis reveals the connection between how _The Lord of the Rings_ was written (and revised) and how it feels to read. But, and also: In the words of @glennf , it “stabs you with a Morgul-blade halfway through”. In the heart. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/opinion/tolkien-grief-lord-rings.html?unlocked_article_code=1.908.cHMV.eG9y1OxU9wRB&

• Post #296397

  A demonstration of how English scrobbles up words from other languages, in two sentences. [from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque ]

• Post #10228

  One for @clive@saturation.social: “Our central hypothesis is that poetic form operates as a general-purpose jailbreak operator.” Adversarial poetry is notably effective at delivering attack prompts for LLMs. https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1